Corrin Lakeland has an interesting
argument
for targeted advertising. A niche vendor might
not be able to justify the expense of a non-targeted
campaign, even if there happens to be a great fit
between that vendor's product and a subset of the
audience. Someone who goes with just the advertised
mainstream brand will end up with a suboptimal choice.

Won't somebody please think of the small businesses?

Unfortunately, even though this is a real problem, the
more targeted that advertising gets, the less it helps.
I like small businesses, but I'm still running
Disconnect to block most
targeting and tracking. Why?

Let's use Lakeland's example of carpet. I can go
carpet shopping at the store that's been paying
Little League teams to wear its name for 20 years,
or I can listen to the door-to-door guy who shows up
in my driveway and says he has a great roll of carpet
that's perfect for my house, and can cut me a deal.

A sufficiently well-targeted ad is just the
online version of the guy in the driveway.
And the customer is left just as skeptical.
Speaking of skeptical customers, Eaon Pritchard looks
back at the famous McGraw Hill Man in the Chair
ad (read the whole thing), and writes, What
this ad is about resonates with me when placed in
context of the great digital divide - ie on the one
hand the school of advertising, online in particular,
that favours the hyper-targeted, 'personal' and
data driven tactics that are manifest in the near
subterfuge of cookies, tracking and all manner
of 'behavioural' targeting. And on the other the
approach that favours strategies that contain content,
usefulness, values-based communication, involvement,
storytelling etc to name but a few.

People have learned to be
suspicious of door-to-door home improvement
sellers
and telemarketers. And people ignore email spam,
and choose email services based largely on spam
blocking. Now, we're finding targeted web ads
"creepy." And when your creepy marketing alarm goes
off, that's because your inner economist pulled it.

Are there direct mail and email spam campaigns with
good ROI? Yes, but direct marketing is a never-ending
parasite/host game. People discard mail printed
"bulk," you get USPS to change it to "Standard".
Spam filters block one variant of a message, you get
crazy with the Unicode and send different ones.
Meanwhile, when people don't take advertising
personally,
it works—and not just as a response rate to a
cold call/direct mail/junk fax/email spam/targeted web
ad, but as a real signal that will influence people years
later.

Non-creepy advertising isn't perfect, and doesn't
solve all the customer/vendor match-up problems in
the world. We have a lot of non-advertising tools
for that. But it's a fallacy to say that just because
non-creepy ads have a problem doing something, creepy
ads are any better.

Five-cent guide to how to be a top one percent freelance writer without having to learn to write very well

Always turn in your stuff on deadline, at the right
length, in the correct format. Read the contributor's
guide and do the basics of what it says. Don't spell
anyone's name wrong. Welcome to the top 20%.

Learn your subject to the point where you know more
than 3 out of 4 members of the audience. This might
be hard or not depending on the subject and how many
stories you can sell on related subjects. Get the
facts right and answer the questions that an informed
reader would ask. Welcome to the top 5%.

Don't just write down a bunch of stuff, tell
a story. This takes practice, but there are basic
plots that people don't get tired of hearing so you
can borrow one of those.

Now you've done it. Congratulations. You're still
not getting paid, because some adtech weasels are
going to track the people who read your stuff and sell
them ads on cat GIFs, so the advertisers can pay some
bottom-feeder site instead of the original content
site that you write for. But congratulations.

As a publisher we feel we've been raided by the ad
industry. We've done site audits and been flabbergasted
by how many third party cookies have been dropped on
our site by commercial partners – they were stealing
our data.

The problem is that most people don't understand how
advertising succeeds. It does not succeed by eliciting
the "Shut up and take my money!" response, as most
people assume. If it did, then targeted ads would be
the way to go. But "banner blindness" has long been
recognized, and click-throughs are generally pathetic.

However, advertising remains successful by subtly,
gently shaping your awareness, tastes and motivation
on every level from lifestyle, to lifestyle
accessories, to brands, to products, to sellers.

Most people resist the notion that they are
manipulated in this way, and thus cling to the "logic"
of targeted advertising and the belief that it can
only benefit them by presenting them with deals for
items that they happen to be on a hair trigger to buy.

That model might work, but it is not the model of
advertising that works now, and the latter is the
point of Marti's argument -- that targeted ads are
undermining the existing successful aspects of
advertising. Worse, they do so by taking the worst
performing facet of advertising, and positing a "fix"
that will allow it to replace the best facets.

It isn't just a choice between direct response or
subtle manipulation, though. Advertising does carry
a signal that it's in your interest to be able to
interpret, and the less that the ad is specific to
you, the more information about the advertiser's
intentions it carries.

In the pre-web media environment, I spent a few
minutes of dealing with direct marketing per day,
sorting my postal mail and handling cold calls. But I
spent a lot more time with the signalful advertising
in newspapers, magazines, and on TV. Somehow the
balance of how much targeted and non-targeted material
I have to deal with has changed a lot. And I get way,
way less value from advertising now.

Adtech proponents
like to quote John Wanamaker's famous
saying,
half the money I spend on advertising is wasted;
the trouble is I don’t know which half,
and, of course, then add that with the next
generation of adtech, that waste will go away.
But it can't. Advertising is an exchange of value:
the advertiser gives information (not just the content
of the ad, the signal that the ad exists at all,
and where it appears) in exchange for attention.
When targeted advertising tries to change the deal,
and ask for attention without offering anything in
return, users respond by blocking the worthless
ads.

[I]n the case of big tech companies like Facebook, the
way power is structured means that you too are being
treated like a feminized, powerless individual
regardless of who you are. Facebook assumes that you,
its user, aren’t as smart as Facebook’s engineers, that
its algorithms know what is best for you, that you
won’t notice or care if your privacy is violated, and
that even if it violates your privacy or shares your
content without asking you it will get away with it.
Facebook is the Man, and you are his servant,
regardless of your gender or race. On Facebook, we are
all women, making ourselves respectable in hopes that
society will be nicer to us than it is to others.

So when Houston writes, Another potential
solution is personalisation-ad targeting based on
data profiling-but that raises the concern that
advertisers and publishers are overstepping the mark
when it comes to targeting promotions using personal
data. Anyone that has visited a website only to be
mercilessly stalked by its ads for the remainder of
their onward journey across the web understands how
creepy that can be, he’s half right. But creepy
targeting doesn't just fail to help the medium, it hurts.

I have a longer
explanation of that, but another way to
look at it is this. Conversations, including
business conversations, are two-way: both buyer and
seller ask for attention and provide information.
Real advertising is one-way, but the advertiser
is offering information and asking for attention.
That’s not just the information in the ad. The
ad’s existence, and the fact that it’s running
in a certain place, are valuable information about the
advertiser’s intentions.

But targeted advertising, like email spam,
telemarketing, and cold calling before it, is
one-sided. The selling side is both collecting and
using information and asking for attention. Humans
dislike cold calls so much that we have programmed
machines to avoid them, and now people are programming
spam filters and ad blockers to dodge them.

Houston is right about making better ads and getting
the web to work more like print, but there's still a
missing piece. If we really want to increase trust
in web advertising as a medium, we need to fix the
privacy bugs in browsers that make creepy targeting
possible, or at least get out of the way of people who
are fixing them. Real advertisers should be backing
the Cookie
Clearinghouse and similar privacy efforts.